Miscellaneous Hacks - Secure Streaming MP4 Videos with Flowplayer, Cloudfront, Signed and Expiring URLs

While it's virtually impossible to make embedded videos on your forum 100% secure there are a few things you should be doing. Streaming is part of the puzzle but the nefarious user can easily rip the stream using any number of freely available online tools. Of course they can also simply get a copy of Camtasia or some other screen recording software and record the video directly from their computer monitor.

If all you're doing is streaming then it's still a simple matter to take your embed code from the source and paste it into another website.

Signing your videos makes it slightly more difficult but to really stop your embed code appearing on somebody elses site you need to make the links expire after a predefined period.

I was recently asked by a client to look at their current video serving solution and found it sadly lacking in any form of security whatsoever. Links were clearly visible by viewing the source code and videos could be easily downloaded by pasting the links in a browser.

I couldn't find much information about integrating flowplayer with cloudfront utilizing signed and expiring urls into vbulletin so I ended up writing my own vb hack.

I thought others might find it useful so here it is.

Once you've set up Cloudfront streaming with amazon it's then relatively straightforward to embed them in your forum using this hack.

I've included instructions but if something is not clear please ask. While I will make every effort to check this page and answer questions it will depend on my schedule.

Lux

PS: This mod is for streaming MP4 files but it should be relatively simple for somebody to change the code to accommodate other formats that flowplayer uses. Likewise other players could be used by making minor changes to the code.

UPGRADE

Version 1.1 - Added code to remove filename from posts displayed in activity.php (aka "What's New")